


Garden of Hades

by Bleed_Peroxide



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Character Study, Depression, Gen, Ishgardians Burn Heretics At The Stake, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21955612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bleed_Peroxide/pseuds/Bleed_Peroxide
Summary: "The years swirled and blended into one another, the fascination he'd had in the hues of souls lost to a monochromatic emptiness, dull and lifeless as the concrete labyrinths of Garlemald. A quiet part of his soul yearned for the beauty and greenery he'd so loved in Amaurot, wondering if he could perhaps create but a small reminder of it. A part of him remained naively hopeful that he might stir recognition, in one of them……No. He forced himself to entertain the thought no further.He would not waste his Creation on the likes of these."An Emet-Selch-centricfic for @Hummingways for the FFXIV Gift Exchange 2019! ♥PLEASEheed the tags. While I have avoided making such content particularly long or drawn out, the tags are there in case such content could be triggering and/or upsetting.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	Garden of Hades

Emet sometimes struggled to remember the elegant spires and lush greenery of Amaurot, as the centuries of orchestrated chaos in Allag, in Garlemand, slowly bled into those halcyon days.  The harsh, hurried tones of the Eorzean's language still chafed against his ears, as he longed for the harmonious Amaurotine tongue that once filled the air like music.

In his earlier years on the Source, Emet had made an attempt to teach them how to speak it. In that first century, he still carried the naive hope that perhaps, in one of these mortals, there might be a shard of his peers. Perhaps a familiar tongue might stir long-forgotten memories, even if the reason eluded them.  Given the brevity of their lives and peculiar aversion to novelty, it had been a fruitless effort: rather than see the beauty of a language that relied more on pitch or nuance than the words themselves, it was often dismissed as needlessly complex… or even terrifying.

None remembered. Not one. Like some vulgar, half-formed Creation, these beings were a crude imitation of those in Amaurot. Even the most enlightened, intrigued as they were, reached the end of their brief lifespans long before they could begin to understand, let alone converse. 

Emet-Selch abandoned this endeavor after being burned at the stake in what was to be known as Ishgard. It would also be the last time he would attempt to find some kind of kinship, or any reflections of that forgotten world. 

Amaroutine resembled the language of the wyrms with whom they waged war, the priest had explained. Emet-Selch feigned resignation as he felt the flames consume his body, feigned death so that he might walk away come nightfall and mend his ruined body.

Perhaps worse than the pain was the sight of a mother idly munching on popped corn as she watched him writhe in pain. Her impassive face was in stark contrast to the adolescent daughter she’d brought with her to view the spectacle. The girl had stared up at Emet in terror, silent tears running down her cheeks. 

_Ah._ He recognized her. With silvery hair and alabaster skin, she reminded him of the goddess statues that adorned mortal shrines. 

_Shiva_ , he remembered. An unusual name for their kind… but then again, she was an unusual girl. Her soul had the brilliance of a glittering diamond - and unlike most of her ilk, she had a  _fondness_ for dragons.  Unsurprisingly, she had taken to the Amaurotine tongue surprisingly well. He recalled being asked many a time to keep an eye on the door as she’d carefully turned over dragon eggs in the hearth, hiding the unborn clutch amidst firewood. They both knew what happened to heretics. 

_She shouldn’t have to witness this._

He’d tried to offer her a smile - more for her comfort than his own.  He decided against it when he felt the movement cause another piece of his flesh to slide onto his chest.

He had assumed watching such an act would terrify her into compliance. With a mind like hers, he had hoped she might lead a scholarly but ultimately unexciting life. What a delightful surprise it had been to learn in the centuries that followed that the girl became equal parts deified and demonized for her kinship with wyrms. 

Would that he’d had the comfort of such knowledge then. 

He thought he had known grief in Amaurot; Emet would soon learn that he had barely had so much as a taste of it. He discovered the true depths of despair in his second century, as the suffocating solitude began to unravel his mind. Yet this damnable vessel, as limited as it was on this star, was incapable of being destroyed in any meaningful, permanent way. 

Burning. Jumping. Bleeding. Consumption. He had known every agony a living creature could know, heard his own death rattling in his throat. As a man that had once manifested his desires with the power of Creation,  it was a cruel irony that he could not even unmake his own prison of flesh. 

He could not die. He watched a wild dog gnawing at his broken leg, bones poking from the skin. Throwing himself from a cliff several malms above, the impact had shattered his bones but left his mind mercilessly intact. As he felt the chill seep into his bones, once elegant attire marred by blood and dirt....

_I tire of this._

In his third century, despair coagulated into resignation. If Emet could not die, there was no meaning to these fruitless endeavors. Indeed, his time spent dwelling on the edges of consciousness had given him ample time to think. Had he carried any room in his heart for such sentiments, he might have found it amusing that he contemplated the nature of what it meant to be alive with renewed fervor, even as he spent much of his own time hovering on the edges of death. 

How vain, how hopeful, he had been to compare these...  _mortals_ to the Amaurotines. They were but gross imitations of the valiant beings that had once surrendered their lives to save their world. 

He'd seen the way more compassionate dealt with misshapen, sickly infants that disease or simple misfortune sometimes brought into the world. None would argue they were alive by the barest definition… yet most had an innate understanding of when such tragic creatures lacked the true spark of life and knowledge. It was better, the parents would murmur in hushed voices, to euthanize such pitiable things. It was better to let them die with dignity, painlessly. 

Unlike Amaurot, wherein death was a thought exercise more than anything, mortals all had their own beliefs about the topic and how they coped with its inevitability. Many took comfort in the notion of a resting place for the soul, granted through the worship of a benevolent being that took interest in the affairs of their devoted. Emet was reminded vaguely of Zodiark at first - but these mortals had not created this deity to fulfill their whims. Rather, they operated under the idea that this deity had created  _them_. 

Emet had balked at the idea, but of course, said nothing. As they continued their supplications, he bit his tongue against asking the rationale of offering prayers to a god disinclined (or unable) to grant wishes so minor as healing the sick. He was often tempted to simply make the medicine that would cure “terminal” diseases.

He resisted the impulse, watching with practiced indifference as they dug a hole six fulms deep. 

Finite beings were scared of that which they did not understand. He had already been burnt at the stake once, courtesy of ignorant men confusing benevolence for “dark magic”. It may as well have been another lifetime, yet he still remembered the sensation of burning upon the pyre. Once was enough to test the limits of his generosity.

More curiously, some _embraced_ their mortal nature, their cyclical life on the Shards. The most docile organisms - “prey animals” - consumed plants, and were seemingly created for the sole purpose of being eaten by more powerful creatures. These were then eaten by even more powerful beings in return. One sustained the other, again and again… and at the very top of that proverbial pyramid stood Mortal Men. Yet even He was not immune, as the great Predator himself was returned humbly into the earth. Bones were reduced to dust and seeped into the soil that nourished the roots of plants, content to harm none and subsist on sunlight. 

When tragic offspring were born, it was this promise of death begetting life that seemed to bring the greatest comfort. As one that held the power of Creation, Emet failed to see the beauty in necessitating death at all. But living among mortals as he did, he began to wonder, to think like them…. just a little. 

Let those with malformed, tragic lives die peacefully, so that their lives might return to the aether and sustain others. Being as they were, they would hardy know what was happening. 

Would it no be more....  _humane_ to extend the same courtesy to the aborted beings that scurried across the Shards?

The next few centuries were blur, as civilizations rose and fell by his own hand. Within that blur were a few brilliant mortals, whose souls blazed with colors the like of which he had never seen. He felt the familiar stirring of fondness in the embers of his heart... sentiments Emet had thought died in a way his mortal flesh could not. 

But this pleasure was not without pain. He learned quickly the exquisite pain that the bonds between men brought. Mortals were, after all, destined to die by very definition. Like the incense lit upon memorial shrines, these beings' lives burned out with startling speed. The memory of their presence lingered well after their flames had extinguished, sometimes for longer than they had walked upon the earth. 

He had initially blamed it on the temperamental heart of the man whose body he decided to…  _borrow,_ for lack of a better term, near the end. 

It was practicality that had compelled him to do so at first. It was one thing to whisper suggestions from the shadows, as he had in Allag; it was another thing to be the one on the throne and remove the middle man entirely. But Solus sos Galvus was a rather fascinating mind and body to inhabit. He was content to let another being play puppeteer while offering insight from the periphery of Emet’s mind. 

Judging from the terrified whispers he’d heard from mortals, possession was supposed to be a battle of wills. But, rather than struggle, Solus had seemed  _intrigued_ by the being that wished to make use of his body and empire. Emet initially wondered if it was a proverbial white flag, but the answer was much simpler than that: like Emet, Solus was a curious man. When he addressed Emet as a parasite, there was a notable lack of bite in the word. And Emet, for his part, was polite enough to not refer to Solus as a  _host_. 

He was hesitant to call him a “friend”…. but it was certainly a peculiar warmness, an understanding to the symbiosis between them. 

The Amaurotines were -  _had_ been, Emet corrected himself with a grimace - a social race; the infighting that was so common with beings on the Source would have been unheard of in Amaurot. Though Emet had been rather introverted for an Ascian, he still had an irrepressible desire for  companionship  that was common to all of his kind. Rather than suppress these instincts, as he had once hoped, the Paragon's time on this shard had only intensified these sentiments. 

No… he could not blame his own sentimentality on the influence of soul who shared this vessel. 

A seasonal plague ravaged the land, and among its losses was a son he himself he had sired.

The poor child had not yet reached his fifth nameday. 

Before then, Emet had not understood why mortals grieved as they did, confined to lives woefully short compared to his own. The idea had initially _angered_ him; who are  _they_ to grieve when death lurked around the corner the horizon for every one of them? Didn’t they have entire faiths  _centered_ around it? How could they understand true loss?

As Emet had held his own son's corpse in his arms, tracing the soft line of his brow with a gloved finger... he wondered if perhaps he had been mistaken in his estimation of mortals. He and Solus had borne this child, woven dreams for his future that would never be realized. He had known that this child would die, like every other mortal. 

Yet still... there was an ache in his soul that he had not known since Amaurot. He tried, desperately, to blame the emotions of Solus as that which compelled him to shed tears. 

_Do not pretend you are a stranger to grief,_ Solus had replied. 

At the anger that had burned in Emet’s chest - **_how_ ** **dare** **_you, you arrogant_ ** \- the mortal had added with the same careful kindness, _I do not know the source. Only that it is an emotion that shadows above all others. I fear I should drown in it, were I to wander too close_ _._

**_Oh, young emperor, you cannot_ begin  _to imagine._**

_I know. But now… perhaps I might understand but a shade of it._

Closing the doors to his chambers, the men had cast off the facade of Emperor for a fortnight and permitted themselves to grieve. He would not make the same mistake and lose another century to suicidal despair. Knowing the pain of both, he preferred the ache of grief to the ache of insanity. 

And so Emet continued his work.   


Subjugation, desperation, supplication to primitive gods. The cycle was predictable and, after some time witnessing it time and time again.... monotonous to the point of  _boredom_. The world tipped further out of balance, closer to the brink from which there could be no recovering. 

The Rejoining. 

Emet reminded himself of his goal, the utopia to be restored if he kept his goals intact. 

The years swirled and blended into one another,  the fascination he'd had in the hues of souls lost to a monochromatic emptiness, dull and lifeless as the concrete labyrinths of Garlemald. A quiet part of his soul yearned for the beauty and greenery he'd so loved in Amaurot, wondering if he could perhaps create but a small reminder of it. A part of him remained naively hopeful that he might stir recognition, in one of them…

…No. He forced himself to entertain the thought no further. 

He would not waste his Creation on the likes of these. 

At the peak of his orchestrated chaos, Emet sloughed off his mortal vessel. Solus was near the end of his natural lifespan, and had began to tire from ravages of old age. Being as intertwined with him as long as he had, Emet himself had began to feel…. an approximation of aging. Certainly a weariness. 

The decision was unanimous: both were ready to die. Solus’s spirit had fluttered away with a grateful brush against Emet’s own. His last words were the typical jibe - _twas a interesting life, parasite,_ hardly louder than a whisper in the back of his mind.Emet watched as the flame of the man’s soul flowed and assimilated into that great aetherial stream. And with that, their shared vessel felt… empty. Lonely in a way that he had not been in over sixty years. 

It was remarkably easy to cast off the shackles of the living.... and rather ironic, he thought, considering how ardently he'd chased after death in his youth. If asked (with the vain assumption that one might, indeed, ask), he felt he had earned himself a period in which to drift, to dream, to _rest_. With his mortal shell weakening, he had begun to sense the distant light of Ascian souls more keenly - namely those of Lahabrea and Elidibus, who seemed perfectly content to watch him while he got his proverbial hands dirty. 

He chose to take his place amidst the shadows and observe. With idle interest, he watched as Elidibus and Lahabrea attempted to continue what he had left unfinished back on the Source as he felt himself drifting towards a place that glowed with immense, overpowering Light. There was something - no, some _one,_ who soul did not merely glow but  _blazed_ in shades of sapphire. Even as powerful as the light around their soul, its brilliance was unmistakable. 

It was beautiful. 

He had not felt such excitement since his first century on the Source. Who  _was_ this being, whose soul seemed to overflow with wisdom? He knew the ways in which mortals' emotions painted their hearts. Cruelty festooned them in ribbons of entrails and viscera; how often Emet smelled their sins on their skin, the rot within their cores as it clung their breath. 

Too accustomed to the depravity of man, the purity of this soul felt like a baptism. Had he lungs, Emet would have taken a deep breath so that it might suffuse his entire being. 

Just as he began to discern details - indeed, twas a mortal man from who he sensed this beautiful color...

...his foolish grandson wrenched him back into that crippling amalgamation of flesh he called a body. 

He had almost forgotten how anger felt, as the first flames of it seared through his chest. 

How dare he? How  _dare_ he?  How dare this arrogant, sniveling infant of an emperor imprison him in these shackles? There was a brief moment where Emet entertained the notion of killing the impudent whelp. He could almost see the way malice curled around the boy’s heart like a miasma… and he held no delusions that the new emperor had any particular fondness for him. What harm could he do, should he - 

_Calm yourself, Hades. It was not him who brought you back._

That man. 

Emet-Selch had not spoken directly with Elidibus since their days on the Star - each involved in their own machinations among the Shards - yet his voice was achingly familiar. In his mind’s eye, he could already seen the man’s distinctive white robes, the way his smile carried a peculiar blend of politeness and condescension. But it was familiar all the same, his personal quirks ones that the Architect had long since learned to discern. Even as Elidibus cooled the flames of his anger, Emet could detect the Ascian’s distinctive aetherial signature woven into this mortal vessel, like fingerprints upon glass. 

No mere mortal could have created such a wonderfully malleable body. Emet wriggled his fingers, watching the bones and joints shift beneath his skin. He found his eyes meet his own reflection in the window, a decidedly more youthful visage than he remembered staring back. Indeed, the aches and pains of age that he carried as Solus were all but gone. By comparison, this vessel felt like poetry in motion - even the most vain flourish felt as natural as breathing. 

“I hope it’s to your liking?” Elidibus asked pleasantly. “It must have been quite cumbersome, being trapped in an aging body. Though, I imagine, molding a new body would be equally tiresome.” 

“It had its merits and its deficiencies,” Emet answered evenly. “Though I thank you all the same. I do find this younger vessel more… pleasing.” 

“In function or in aesthetics?” 

Disembodied though the voice was, Emet could hear the knowing smirk in its tones. He chose not to dignify the question with a response. He focused his energies instead on finding the source of that glorious light from before, anxious that his Sight might well have been obscured by the limitations of this vessel. 

He need not have worried. It took very little concentration at all to feel the warm blaze of that sapphire soul, though it seemed different in a way he couldn’t place his finger on. He was reminded of the way young pupils experimented in the Akademia Anyder, dusting various compounds over fire to see how the colors of the flames changed. 

No…. it was more that a mere parallel. This flame without form had flickered into existence what felt like mere moments ago, yet there was a density, a muted sorrow within that brilliant blaze that seemed impossible for a soul so young. Grief, bitterness, guilt… to his Sight, they were all black threads that threatened to snuff the fire out. Countless times, he’d seen how even the smallest threads were enough to cool one’s soul to embers. 

It had been something he experienced firsthand as he coexisted in the original body of Solus, marveling how every blink of the eye seemed to reveal new wrinkles on his flesh, or how his hair bleached white before his eyes. The Ascian had learned early on to rely on his Sight to identify mortals; even a difference of as little as a decade was enough to render some nearly unrecognizable as time ravaged their bodies. 

It was enduring one too many deaths that made Solus a mere echo of the passionate youth he’d encountered so many years. Indeed, his soul had already began to dim beneath the shackles of those fine threads well before his hair had greyed. 

But no… as he observed, he noticed that these threads danced  _with_ , rather than in opposition, this mortal man’s soul. Rather than suppress or war against these sentiments, it would seem they were an ever-burning catalyst. 

Only those within the Convocation, riddled with equal measures of desperation and determination, had borne such duality. 

His heart fluttered, hardly daring to hope. 

Only those within the Convocation bore the proverbial “mark” of their god upon their souls. It was a gift only the eldest of the primals possessed, given the power required to sway a sentient being to carry out Their will. A lesser gods’ thrall tended to mutilate one’s soul beyond recognition, rendering them witless slaves. 

The light of light of his ( _his_? when did he began to think in such possessive terms?) mortal definitely bore the mark of a thrall, which was hardly surprising.

However, it did not bear the mark of Zodiark. 

That tentative hope shifted to nausea.

After millennia of seeking out one of those long-lost soul, to find one so gloriously dense and Rejoined...

... it was defiled by Her.

**_How much more must you demand, Hydaelyn?_ **


End file.
